AI, Our Angel, & Enlightenment

ANGEL HAS A FIGHTING SPIRIT... 

A sudden, loud bang startled me; I jumped out of my seat and ran upstairs. Initially, I thought someone was breaking into our home. Images of an angry mob demolishing our front door raced through my mind because, earlier that day, I’d heard a radio broadcast about the US Capitol Hill violence; it was January 6th, 2021. When I reached the main floor, I expected to see a stranger in our home, but instead I found our twelve-year-old dog, Angel, having a seizure on the living room floor.

The only angry mob I encountered was the invisible one that had already infiltrated Angel's most private home, her body. She was frothing at the mouth, rapidly kicking as though treading water; her tongue dangling out of her mouth, and her eyes had a faraway look like she was in a trance. It was evident that some foreign entity had initiated this violence from inside her, and I knew intuitively that something hideous was in her brain.

I dropped down beside her and gently placed my hands on her torso. I calmly reassured her with my loving presence that everything would be all right, even though I thought she was going to die in my arms. While all of this drama unfolded, my other two dogs were close by, casting a shadow of great concern. I telepathically tried to reassure them that the violence Angel was experiencing had nothing to do with our actions. After what seemed like an eternity, Angel's body stopped convulsing; her tongue retracted back inside her mouth, and her eyes wandered dreamily. She was making her way back to us.

It took Angel a few minutes to regain her composure and orient herself back to reality. Then she stumbled to her feet. I reached for my phone and contemplated calling Ghostbusters because Angel still looked possessed, like she had been cursed. I knew 911 would be of no service; I needed a 911 for animals. So I called Angel's regular doctor at Amherst veterinary, and their office redirected me to the VCA Canada Vancouver Animal Emergency and Referral Centre. Within minutes, I was driving Angel to the hospital, leaving my other two dogs behind. They watched me from the window as I sped away, their white coats opaque and ghostly.

Angel had a second seizure at the hospital, and the doctors kept her overnight for further testing. Back home, I waited, anticipating their phone call. And when the call came the next day, I wasn't surprised to learn that the MRI machines had pinpointed a cancerous lesion in her head, which the doctors identified as a brain tumour.

Neurologist Doctor Danielle Zwueste classified Angel's tumour as a meningioma tumour, which she said grew from the meninges membrane surrounding Angel's brain and spinal cord. Most of Angel's tumour was located outside of her brain, but that a small portion of the tumour was growing into her frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for behavioural actions like thinking. As it currently stands, Angel's tumour measures about one centimetre in diameter, and relative to her brain size, which is about seven centimetres in diameter, her particular tumour is not considered very big. However, it was big enough to put pressure on her brain, and caused her seizure. Fortunately, meningioma tumours are mostly considered benign: they are slow growing with a low potential to spread.

We had three options. The first option was high-risk, seven-hour brain surgery. High risk not only because of Angel's age and the lengthy time she would need to be under aesthetic but also because of the tumour’s proximity to healthy brain tissue. The surgeon would have to "dig" and "scoop" out the tumour, placing healthy brain tissue in harms’ way: damage could alter her personality. The second option was a three-day radiation therapy with relatively low risk, but this treatment was not offered in Vancouver yet; we would have to make the eleven-hour drive to Calgary, through the Rocky Mountains, on the Coquihalla Highway, which has been officially documented in a 2012 reality TV series as the “Highway Thru Hell”. To make matters worse, we would have to make the trip in early February, with Canadian winter still in full swing. The third option was to leave Angel on meds with palliative care at home and a life expectancy of roughly four months.

Doctor Zwueste told us that she could schedule Angel's surgery within the next three days. The earliest date for the radiation treatment was three weeks away at the Calgary VCA pet hospital.

We chose radiation treatment. In the three-week interim Angel needed to remain on medication, a process similar to palliative care. The doctor prescribed 120 mg of phenobarbital and 20 mg of prednisone per day to ward off any subsequent seizures and reduce inflammation in her brain. Due to the medications’ side effects— lethargy and lack of interest; a constant, voracious, non-discerning appetite and insatiable thirst; excessive urination; and shortness of breath with heavy panting—we were waking up four times a night to comfort her. After only a few days, Angel's quality of life had already taken a nosedive.

Radiation is the least invasive technique with the highest life expectancy, not to mention the best chance of a quality life without medications. Also, my inner voice kept telling me that cancer doesn’t always get to win.

Angel has a fighting spirit, so we wanted to give her a fighting chance. After all, she’s our Angel! We had found her near the mangrove forests on the east side of Cozumel Island in Mexico when she was a puppy. Just a day prior to finding her, we’d had a funeral for our previous dog, Simba; we’d said goodbye to him and spread his ashes into the sea. It was a serendipitous moment to say goodbye to one dog only to find another one waiting for a loving home. I couldn’t help but think that Simba sent an Angel our way.

Over the years computer science has become more sophisticated, and complex algorithms utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to improve medical science with advanced technologies. The AI revolution is grounded in treatment planning like stereotactic radiation, a machine designed to target and destroy cancerous brain tumours with little or no damage to surrounding healthy body tissue, regardless of whether these tissues belong to us, or to our pets. Radiotherapy doesn't involve surgical incisions, so it's less risky than traditional surgery and less archaic.

Radiation Oncologist Doctor Genevieve Hammond designed Angel’s medical protocol, though she would never even meet Angel in person. We would travel to Calgary with Angel, while Doctor Hammond worked remotely, controlling the radiation machine from her home in Victoria, BC. The technicians at the Calgary clinic would physically meet Angel and prep her for the treatments. Once Angel was anesthetised and placed in position for treatment, the technician, Emily, would turn on the machine. And then Doctor Hammond would take control of the ship, so to speak.

Angel would need three treatments of stereotactic radiation therapy over a course of three days with each treatment lasting only five to eight minutes. That’s a total of twenty-four minutes maximum to kill her tumour. Stereotactic radiation uses high photons and protons beams of electromagnetic radiation that are aimed to conform to the shape of the tumour and target the malignant DNA to destroy it. The high dose of radiation delivered would shrink Angel’s tumour and cause the surrounding blood vessels to close off, robbing the tumour of its blood supply: Voila, game over.

I thought about how fabulous it would be if I could use my own electromagnetic energy, the energy that radiates from my bioelectric aura field, to heal as profoundly as artificial intelligence. To destroy a cancerous tumour in less than twenty-four minutes has definite enlightenment merit in my eyes. When I was in India studying with Ayurveda Doctor, Vasant Lad, I asked him: What good is enlightenment if one can’t heal the ill and end suffering? He said that when one is enlightened, they see suffering, differently.

As Angel went into her final treatment, I understood Doctor Lad's comment with more clarity; because of Angel's brain tumour, and the sudden loss of my mom, opposite forces like health and illness, birth and death, had lost their contradictory strength. Instinctively, I knew that Angel’s illness, and my mom’s death were realistic and concrete events that needed to be integrated into health and life. There is no gap between health and sickness, or life and death, and one doesn’t have more strength than the other. Integrated these functional events become a singular flux of lived experiences that reflect an unshakeable naturalness that we share with the plants and the animals: accepting and living life in its entirety. Based on these terms and conditions opposites seem to lose their sharp, contrasting definitions.
Angel completely surrendered to the ordeal that we put her through. Right out of the gates, she succumbed to the moments of her seizure, to the meds' adverse side effects, and the endless trips to the hospital. As an Angel, she accepted the life events that unfolded around her with grace. Doctor Hammond reassured us that Angel would not need any more radiation treatments, as she feels optimistic that the tumour was destroyed. Angel slept in the vehicle most of the way home to Vancouver where she continues to recuperate in the company of her pack. Angel’s healing journey and my mom's passing have brought me much closer to the experiential reality that death and sicknesses are not separate from life. I can now taste them in every breath I take. I can feel the wisdom of their teachings, their promise, not of a past or a future, but of something more eternal: the here and the now, a dimension that eludes Time.
I continue to spend much of my time in nature with the spirit of my mom and my three dogs at my side. Angel has the strength and the will to participate in all the daily walks. We continue to journey together, not in a sequence of Time but rather in the spirit of eternal momentum. I am grateful to Doctor Lad and the wisdom of Ayurveda that continues to influence my life. I am grateful to Angel’s loving and compassionate doctors, and their medical computer sciences, armed with the brilliance to destroy cancerous tumours. In just over a month, Angel’s life has almost come full circle. Soon, she’ll be back where she started, happy and playful. In three-months’ time, we’ll schedule another CAT-scan to check the status of her tumour. In the meantime, our goal is to wean Angel off her medications so she can return to a drug-free state and once again experience the joys’ of a dog’s life.